Democrats wager on a long shot Kentucky Republican's seat joins expanding battlefield in the fight for U.S. House By David Rogers, The Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2006 BARDSTOWN, KY --"Dusty Bibles lead to Dirty Lives" warns a church sign in nearby Hardin County. And forgetting your roots can be hell in Kentucky politics. That is the charge Democrats hope to make against Republican Rep. Ron Lewis, a Baptist minister born in a log cabin who won his seat in Congress in 1994 on a platform promising term limits. Twelve years later, that platform has faded and Mr. Lewis is the picture of the entrenched incumbent: earning $165,000 a year, sitting on a powerful House committee and controlling a campaign chest heavily funded by business and that has paid thousands to his wife, Kayl, for her work as a campaign worker. The campaign payments to Mrs. Lewis stopped ths year, but taxpayer money is paying for mass mailings and teleconferenced town-hall meetings that are more frequent than Mr. Lewis's speaking appearances on the House floor. When pressed by a caller to a local radio show, Mr. Lewis promises to be open to raising the federal minimum wage. But his voting record is mixed on the issue, and he has lent little help to lawmakers trying to extend the child-tax credit to minimum wage workers whose income is so low they don't qualify. "Ron Lewis has forgotten where he came from," says Democratic challenger Mike Weaver, a 67-year-old retired Army colonel and state legislator who laces his stump speeches with quotes from Gen. George Patton. "When everybody's thinking alike, somebody's not thinking," is a Patton line that Mr. Weaver borrows to describe the Republican lock on Washington. Mr. Lewis is part of that mind-set, Mr. Weaver says: "He's a very nice person who follows with loyalty to his party." If Democrats are to gain the 15 seats needed to control the House, they must widen the battlefield with long-shot sleeper races like this one. In a state with a high poverty rate, the Second District contest is between two men who struggled with poverty and now crystallize the debate over income inequality in the nation. And with U.S. troops in Iraq, war's hand is felt here in places like Bardstown, where four men from a local National Guard battery were killed in a single day in Vietnam decades ago. Mr. Lewis, 59, made history when he won a special election in May 1994, signaling the Republican takeover of Congress later that year. Mr. Weaver must persuade voters to reverse themselves and, this time, challenge Republicans. It won't be easy. President Bush carried the district with 65% of the vote in 2004, and Mr. Lewis's likability is a huge asset. "He's a legend in name recognition," says Dan Kelly, the Republican floor leader in the Kentucky Senate. "People won't vote for Mike Weaver as much as they will vote against the present administration. I hope by the fall more people will have come to their senses," says Jodie Haydon, 61, who served with the Bardstown Guard unit in Vietnam, and supports Mr. Weaver. But his friend Jim Hagan down the street is undecided: "I like Bush a hell of a lot," he says, "He'll tell you exactly what it is, and he'll do it and he doesn't [care] if he's right or wrong." House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) campaigned with Mr. Weaver last week; retired Gen. Wesley Clark has helped with fund-raisers in New York and Los Angeles. Vice President Dick Cheney is scheduled to be in Owensboro today for Mr. Lewis. Amid problems for Republicans in the state--Gov. Ernie Fletcher has been indicted for allegedly rewarding political supporters with protected state jobs--Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, the de facto state party chief, can't afford a loss when he wants to move up to be his party's Senate leader. "They're worried about it, they're bringing the vice president in here," says former Senate Democratic Whip Wendell Ford. "All the things that Ron Lewis hasn't done are beginning to catch up with him." Mr. Lewis would argue he has done a great deal. In 2004, he helped engineer with Kentucky's senators a multibillion-dollar buyout of a Depression-era tobacco quota system that had become a burden to the state's growers. And his staff provides a list of items added to tax bills over the years to help local manufacturers and state interests. But his lack of visibility--he speaks on the House floor only every other month--hurts. A Taylor County farmer dismissed Mr. Lewis as a McConnell "puppet." One of the congressman's prized initiatives--a bill to allow Congress to overrule Supreme Court decisions--has yet to get a hearing from fellow Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. And Mr. Weaver scoffs at Mr. Lewis's claim that he "saved" Fort Knox during Army base closings last year. "He was just there like all of us were" says Mr. Weaver, whose Army and legislative ties made him part of the same lobbying effort. Most telling may be the debate over the federal minimum wage. House Democrats and labor leaders will host an event in Louisville on Friday to raise awareness of the issue in Kentucky, and Mr. Lewis says he will "more than likely" back a $2.10-an-hour increase in the wage, which has been $5.15 an hour since 1997. He notes that he supported the last increase, enacted in August 1996, but his vote came only after the measure was a fait accompli. On prior votes, Mr. Lewis opposed the same wage bill as it moved through the House in 1996, just as he did on a bill in a May 2000 vote. "Anyone who physically or mentally cannot help themselves, I will do everything in my power to help them," Mr. Lewis says. "My family, they were poor.... But no one owed me anything. I never thought that somebody should have the money taken out of their pocket and handed to me." Mr. Weaver says this misses the point, given Republican tax cuts and the costs facing both the working poor and middle class. "In the past five years in Kentucky, post secondary education [tuition] has increased 10% every year," he says. "We are favoring the richest people in the nation, and I think this is being done at the expense of the middle class." Mr. Weaver came up through the enlisted ranks in the Army. His campaign's black-and-white handout has a picture of him in Vietnam; after 10 years in the Legislature, he has little of Mr. Lewis's easygoing appeal. But he also has been known to pick up homeless hitchhikers and bring them back to his house for a meal or to stay for weeks. "Mike has been around the block," says Mr. Clark. "He's an acquired taste," says Mr. Weaver's wife, Lois. November will tell if voters acquire it.